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Updated: June 9, 2025
The reviver of the simple drama, the discoverer of the position due to art in true human society, the poetic interpreter of bygone views of life, the philosopher, the historian, the aesthete and the critic, the master of languages, the mythologist and the myth poet, who was the first to include all these wonderful and beautiful products of primitive times in a single Ring, upon which he engraved the runic characters of his thoughts what a wealth of knowledge must Wagner have accumulated and commanded, in order to have become all that!
Our art is still worse off than our trade or our politics, for it does not even rest upon use and wont, but is wholly in the air. Yet the typical modern aesthete has learnt where to take cover, for, though destitute of defence, he has not entirely lost the instinct for self-preservation; and, when he finds the eye of reason upon him, he immediately flies to the diversity of opinions.
But he, to whom, up till then, nothing could have seemed so tedious as was all that pertained to the cosmopolitan life of Baden or of Nice, now that he learned that Odette had, perhaps, led a 'gay' life once in those pleasure-cities, although he could never find out whether it had been solely to satisfy a want of money which, thanks to himself, she no longer felt, or from some capricious instinct which might, at any moment, revive in her, he would lean, in impotent anguish, blinded and dizzy, over the bottomless abyss into which had passed, in which had been engulfed those years of his own, early in MacMahon's Septennat, in which one spent the winter on the Promenade des Anglais, the summer beneath the limes of Baden, and would find in those years a sad but splendid profundity, such as a poet might have lent to them; and he would have devoted to the reconstruction of all the insignificant details that made up the daily round on the Cote d'Azur in those days, if it could have helped him to understand something that still baffled him in the smile or in the eyes of Odette, more enthusiasm than does the aesthete who ransacks the extant documents of fifteenth-century Florence, so as to try to penetrate further into the soul of the Primavera, the fair Vanna or the Venus of Botticelli.
And the sun had deepened her skin to cream and tan and rose. Thank God he was a Celt, an artist and an aesthete! He did not mean to keep on staring nor could he stop. He was horribly disturbed. For he knew the signs as the traveler knows the landmarks of an old, familiar road. Heaven help him, one of his periodic fits of madness was upon him! It could not be helped. He was falling in love again.
On such occasions it often happens that a great deal comes to light which would otherwise have been most stead-fastly concealed, and one of them may even be heard to blurt out the most precious secrets of the whole brotherhood. Indeed, a lapse of this sort occurred but a short while ago, to a well-known aesthete of the Hegelian school of reasoning.
And this is the condition of the decadent, of the aesthete, of the free-lover. To be everlastingly passing through dangers which we know cannot scathe us, to be taking oaths which we know cannot bind us, to be defying enemies who we know cannot conquer us this is the grinning tyranny of decadence which is called freedom. Let us turn, on the other hand, to the maker of vows.
And yet Rome should have made a vivid appeal to this cultured man, this aesthete so alive to beauty. Although the transfer of the Court to Milan had drawn away some of its liveliness and glitter, it was still all illuminated by its grand memories, and never had it been more beautiful. It seems impossible that Augustin should not have been struck by it, despite his African prejudices.
"Why, miserable aesthete," I said in a voice of thunder, "that is the true country spirit! That is how the real rustic feels. The real rustic does utter a yell of joy at the sight of a Bayswater omnibus. The real rustic does think London the finest place on the planet. In the few moments that I have stood by this stile, I have grown rooted here like an ancient tree; I have been here for ages.
Even the aesthete himself would seem to be growing a little weary of its indefinitely divided tones, and to be anxious for a colour sensation somewhat more positive than those to be gained from almost imperceptible nuances, of green. Jaded with over-refinements and super-subtleties, we seem in many directions to be harking back to the primary colours of life.
Eye is an aesthete, ear is, at least, cultivated, mind is a gross barbarian, unwilling to think, and desirous only of a tickle or a prod. Or to localize the scene and change the angle a trifle, compare the New York ear for music with the New York taste for reading.
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